Ventus by Karl Schroeder

Karl Schroeder / Ventus / Page 409
en pointe at all times. All she wore on her feet were metallic
toe-slips. He doubted she could run, much less climb over the
broken trees strewn about this new clearing.
"There you are!" she shouted as Axel and Calandria fell
over one last log. "See, we survived! You--you are May and
Chan, aren’t you?"
"Who else would be crazy enough to be here?" he said.
"Are you alone?"
"Yes, it’s just me." Mounce turned and waved vaguely at
the ship. "I was doing a demographic survey, it involved some
close orbits, so that’s why I got caught in the--"
"You can tell us later," said Calandria in her most
diplomatic voice. "The swans are coming." She pointed.
"Ah. Yes." Mounce’s looked disappointed, but not
frightened.
The sky was full of arcing incandescent lines. They
stretched in a spiral all the way to the zenith, like ladders to
heaven. Axel had seen the Heaven hooks when they came to
destroy the Boros estate, and those too had been skyhooks of a
sort, but nothing like this. Where the Heaven hooks had been
cold metal and carbon-fibre, the swans seemed bodiless,
creatures made of light alone.
From his scant reading on the subject, Axel knew the
swans were nanotech, like most of the Winds. They were
constituted from long microscopic whisker-like fibres. These
could manipulate magnetic fields, and in their natural
environment in orbit they meshed together in their trillions to
form tethers hundreds of kilometers long. They drew power
from the planetary magnetic field, and projected it by the
gigawatt to where ever it was needed.
They could fly apart in an instant and recombine in new
forms, he knew. Some of these forms could apparently reach